David Brooks’ “High Five Nation” column – the usual historically-ignorant hagiography of an imagined past – has been passed around quite a bit, lately. It’s usually accompanied by some well-meaning agreement with the premise – that the US used to be such a humble country, despite its goodness and strength, and that modern America has just destroyed that.
When you look from today back to 1945, you are looking into a different cultural epoch, across a sort of narcissism line. Humility, the sense that nobody is that different from anybody else, was a large part of the culture then.
But that humility came under attack in the ensuing decades. Self-effacement became identified with conformity and self-repression. A different ethos came to the fore, which the sociologists call “expressive individualism.”
[ . . . ]
Before long, self-exposure and self-love became ways to win shares in the competition for attention. Muhammad Ali would tell all cameras that he was the greatest of all time. Norman Mailer wrote a book called “Advertisements for Myself.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates sees Brooks’ revisionism for the bullshit it is, and injects a fine dose of reality:
Part of this is Brooks critique of the past half-century, or rather half-critique. From Brooks’ perspective, the problem is that Sonia Sotomayor didn’t go to school in 50s or early 60s, not that her chosen school didn’t admit women in the 50s and 60s. Likewise Brooks doesn’t cite the immodesty of George Wallace declaring eternal segregation “in the name of the greatest people to trod this earth,” he cites the immodesty of Muhammad Ali. The response offends Brooks. The conditions that produce the response, less so.
That’s because the conditions are, themselves, built on American immodesty. I’m thinking of the Jack Johnson winning the championship, and modest Americans launching pogroms against their fellow immodest Americans. I’m thinking about Birth of a Nation’s defense of the treason, and a sitting president offering his immodest endorsement. I’m thinking about a country, circa 1850, whose politicians lorded over one of the last slave societies in the known world, and immodestly argued that it was a gift from God.
Brooks’ revisionism is the same practiced by so many today. The right pushes “death panels”, Obama calls it a lie, and Palin says “so much for civility.” Loads of Virginians supported barring fellow Virginians from enjoying the same basic rights they do, and when I openly call that bigotry, I’m shushed (right and left) for being rude. As Ta-Nehisi put it, the response offends them. The conditions that produced it, less so. Speaks volumes, I think.
